In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity and capabilities. Many advanced mobile devices are configured to perform functions beyond placing and receiving voice calls and sending and receiving mobile messaging service messages (e.g. text and/or multimedia). The mobile devices are capable of data communications, and are used to run a wide variety of applications. Applications include web browsers for surfing the world wide web, e-reader applications for reading e-books, mapping applications, document viewing applications (e.g., for displaying pdf files, documents, spreadsheets, slides), and the like.
The mobile devices are designed to be highly portable, and are therefore of limited size. The dimensions of built-in displays on the devices are correspondingly limited, and can only display a limited amount of information at any time. A user wanting to view a document, image, or book is therefore forced to either view the document/image/book with a very small font/feature size such that the entire document/image/book-page can be displayed on the screen, or view only a portion of the document/image/book-page at a time.
In addition, the built-in displays on the mobile devices consume non-trivial amounts of power when displaying an image. To conserve power, the mobile devices are generally configured to turn off the display screen after short periods of inactivity (e.g., 15 seconds). If the mobile device is used to display an e-book or other document for reading by a user, the automatic turning off of the display after the short period of inactivity interferes with the user's reading. Alternatively, the mobile device's continuous display of the e-book or document on the screen consumes large amounts of power and rapidly depletes the device's battery.
A need therefore exists for a mobile device accessory having an integrated display having very low power consumption, providing continuous display of information thereon, and that can be controlled and powered by the mobile device.